About Amber

Amber Wong is an environmental engineer in Seattle who writes about culture, identity, and her firsthand knowledge about risks posed by hazardous waste sites. Her personal narratives explore her fourth-generation American life through the cultural themes of scarcity and abundance, comfort and unfamiliarity. She’s intrigued about how the statics of culture – ethnicity, gender, even one’s profession – bend the dynamics of modern-day America, and is happily searching for that intersect where her engineering and her writing selves comfortably meet.

As an engineer, she worked in oil shale research (until she left the Tri-Cities), environmental consulting (until she had to read a cut sheet), and public policy for the Environmental Protection Agency (until she retired). Cleanup – literally and metaphorically – weaves through her work, not necessarily because she wants it to, but because it is part of her being.

Recent work has been published in Entropy, Full Grown People, Lunch Ticket (Summer/Fall 2017 featured essayist), Slippery Elm, and Metaphorical Fruit, and her short piece, “How I Learned to Write,” won the Writer’s Connection essay contest. Amber earned an MFA from Lesley University and a master’s degree in civil engineering from Stanford University. She is working on a memoir.